Im-pressed

As time goes by ....
We think it was 1980, 30 years ago, when we packed up Ian’s Chev panel van with our deluxe camping equipment — a Coleman stove, some rudimentary dishes, a mattress and sleeping bags — to head out on the road.
We stayed at the Lions Campground in Neepawa, Man., for one night on that trip and tossed coins at the base of the weir on the Whitemud River, wishing for exactly what we’ve enjoyed all these years.
On this trip, we pulled in late on a Thursday evening. By Friday morning, we had some old friends to see.
One of them was the weir and with some coins, we did it all again.
Ian started his journalism career with the Neepawa Press, which still publishes today. In those days, Jack Huxley was the publisher and one of the owners who hired Ian straight out of Red River Community College in Winnipeg as a green reporter.
“You were the best reporter we ever had,” Jack said more than a few times over coffee at the Neepawa Golf Course. Ian blushed, protested and then simply gave up and enjoyed the praise.

Shell of a town

The grain elevator, a silent sentinel that used to stand above every prairie town, has gone.
The tracks, once-gleaming links to the broad world beyond and patrolled decades ago by Ian’s grandfather, are pitted and rusted, with weeds sprouting between the decaying ties.
The school, the last draw the community might have for young families, closed its doors in June for the final time.
Bars cage the windows of the Shell Lake General Store, and playground equipment, uprooted and idle, lies on the empty lot where the town’s poolroom once stood.
While Shell Lake may not be dead, at the very least it’s on life support, its sluggish and thready pulse stirred only by the grey-haired newcomers who have opted for the small Saskatchewan town to enjoy its well-tended golf course, an adjunct to the Memorial Lake Regional Park that angles off the main road into the town.
Anita Weiers, mayor of the town of 185, said five houses were built last year, a landmark year for the village that has seen most of its young families head off.
“That’s a big building year for us, but young people with families, there’s not much here to hold them,” Weiers said. “Last year the government said we had to build a new (sewage) lagoon, and water treatment. Where are we supposed to get $600,000?
“We tried a lottery and a few other things that didn’t work out too well so we just had to add a sewer levy to the taxes. The taxes are higher here than in the city of Saskatoon.
“The only people to come here are those who retire here to be near the golf course, and most of them go away in the winter.”
The community has offered incentives to businesses to relocate or open up in the town, and even offered lots in the village for $1.
“What can you do?” Weiers said with a shrug. “You just do what you can and keep on keeping on.”
The visit to Shell Lake was our first to the town where Ian’s dad was born back in 1914.
“I recognize the name, but I’m not an old-timer here,” she said. “We just moved here in 1976.”
Then she remounted her bicycle and headed off down the broad main road. Traffic was not an issue.

Now that's a sausage

We had just crossed the border into Saskatchewan, naturally, since that’s what the border signage says.
The logjam was a few hundred yards away, at the gas station at the junction of highway 3, 45 and 21, at Alcurve, Alta. Everybody going either way wants to fill up in Alberta, with its cheaper gas (89.9 cents a litre, a dime cheaper than in Saskatchewan.). We joined the lineup, filled up, got coffee and tea inside and came out to the ubiquitous sound of the car alarm.
They truly are everywhere.
We’ve travelled about four hours east of Edmonton, on the blue highways on the map, smaller and slower but interesting. Stopped at Mundare, Alta., a spot we’d never heard of but filled up with gas just across the road from the big sign saying Small Town...Big Heart.
The words were written under a huge kielbasa, or Ukranian sausage for those of you who haven’t spent time in the West. Mundare is the home of Stawnichy’s Meat Processing, makers of sausage among other things.
We don’t intend to travel Canada according to “the big” category: the giant decorated Ukranian egg in Vegreville, Alta., the big moose on the Trans Canada Highway in Moose Jaw, Sask., the giant nickel in Sudbury, Ont., the goose at Wawa, Ont., but the giant kielbasa in Alberta was an unexpected surprise.
We’ve not been this far north travelling across the Prairies before and true to what friends have long said, it’s very different this way. If you’re comparing this to southern Alberta and Saskatchewan, there are many more clusters of trees, rolling hills and roadside lakes. If you’re still dreaming of life at home on the West Coast, it’s quite flat and barren.
Wildlife doesn’t exactly abound but in the space of a few hours we’ve seen a coyote loping across the highway, a badger hunching close to the ground as it scurried for cover, and multiple skunks and porcupines on the losing end of a battle with traffic.
If our campground in Devon and what’s rolling down the road late on a Sunday afternoon are any indication, Albertans like their camping equipment BIG. We were the “poor folk” in Devon if wealth is measured by the foot. With the exception of a couple of tent trailers, we were the smallest among the hundreds there. Our camping neighbour, a visitor from Germany in a small Class C rental unit, commented on our size compared to the behemoths around us. “You’re doing your trip in a small trailer,” he said in his halting, but precise, English. “All the rest of them are very big.”
Having had six people for dinner on a Saturday night in the Devon campground, we’d say that yes, we are small, but very effective. Our guests toted their own lawn chairs, helped with dinner prep and had a good time.
That is, until about 10 p.m., when the rain started to fall. Then all headed for their respective homes, ours being the smallest.

Rita's Rx

If you don’t think of your pharmacist as part of your medical care team, Rita Lyster says you should think again.
Lyster, owner, manager and pharmacist at Rita’s Apothecary and Home Healthcare Ltd. in Barrhead, Alta., has been educating her clients and customers in her philosophy as a pharmacist. She wants people to know she can dispense their prescriptions, package them in convenient plastic packets, take their blood pressure, give them injections and more.
As her business card says, she offers advice for life.
On a recent trip through her doors, she took one look at Vicki’s leg, diagnosed a fungus and came up with two over-the-counter remedies to be mixed together: one an anti-fungal and the other cortisone to help with any skin irritation. Bless her, things improved within 12 hours and she banished all thought of a long wait at a walk-in clinic.
She’s thrilled that as a pharmacist in Alberta she now has the power to issue her own prescriptions.
And she’s thrilled she’s her own boss while doing it. As a long-time employee for other pharmacies, she always felt she was dancing to their tune and not writing her own music in her own pharmacy.
She is one of five pharmacies serving a town of 4,500 people and is holding her own because she specializes in drugs. Her shelves hold over-the-counter remedies, supplements and orthotic items, the medical items common to any drugstore shelves, but you won’t see a bottle of shampoo or a bag of chips.
She is health oriented.
She has a new machine, dubbed Elvis for a reason none of her staff could really explain. She can package your daily doses in convenient plastic pouches, easy to rip apart and take one dose with you when you know you’ll be away from home.
She’s is hoping to land contracts with facilities such as care homes when they learn how easy and safe Elvis makes the dispensing process.
When she looks to the future, she’s also looking at her family. With three daughters, she thinks of her apothecary as a possible part of their future. Chelsea is in nurses’ training, Caitlin is following in mom’s footsteps and training as a pharmacist, and Caroline would be more than capable of running the business aspects of the pharmacy.
But Lyster is realistic and looks at all, or any, of that dreaming as only a possibility because her girls would do just what mom has done. They’ll formulate their own plan, act on it and make their dream come true.

Smoke gets in your eyes

Tourists line the side of Highway 16, the Yellowhead route through the Canadian Rockies, frantically snapping pictures of the big-horn sheep grazing at the side of the road.
The shutter clicks are frantic because the sheep, about three metres away, are about the only fodder for photographers. Normally, the pictures would be of one mountain peak after another but on this day the roadside markers saying Mt. Robson, elevation 3,954 metres, were useful only to a leg-crossed dog.
The markers point off somewhere indecipherable in the smoke. A forest fire near Williams Lake, B.C., is belching smoke faster than anyone could anticipate and fire officials are bracing for a cold front coming through, preceded by 60 km an hour winds.
Remarkably, we drove through the Rockies in one day without seeing a single mountain peak. Luckily, we’ve made this trip many times and seen many peaks, yet still we felt cheated. Alas for the poor tourists, perhaps making the trip of a lifetime to see a North American Wonder of the World, only to find it veiled in smoke.
But we didn’t expect to hit the rolling foothills of Alberta, and still be shrouded in smoke. Nestled in a valley campground in Devon, Alta. on Aug. 21, southwest of ever-growing Edmonton, we see and smell smoke in the air. Radio tells us Calgary is covered in it, that the entire province is suffering from smoke inhalation. There’s irony in that, amid the smoke, campground fires here are OK, while in the untainted air at the B.C. beginning of our trek there was a campfire ban.
While air quality has improved slightly today and our eyes are no longer stinging, smoke is still there. We’re thankful neither of us, nor the cats, suffer respiratory problems. Otherwise, we’d be on a camping trip, trying to stay indoors.
We set out prepared for rain, snow, sleet and hail but not smoke. Forecasters say it should improve here tomorrow, as we pack up and head for Saskatchewan.
We’ll see if the smoke has managed to cover two or three provinces.

Drug trafficking

The campground host certainly looked interested as our friend Bob said, “Why don’t you pay for the two campsites on your credit card since I brought you the drugs?”
We quickly, and loudly, pointed out that he might want to use the word “prescription”, rather than drugs since he had picked up that last little bit for us at our home drugstore before heading out to meet us for a two-day camp on Vancouver Island. We may not be young, and we may be semi-retired, but it’s our generation that first brought fear and loathing to our parents with the word drugs.
Travelling with drugs, or if you prefer prescriptions, is not simple. Between the two of us, we have a medium Rubbermaid tub full of prescriptions, supplements and natural remedies that will last us for the next four to five months. On top of that, there is a small AC/DC cooler that holds four months supply of Vicki’s medication for multiple sclerosis, meaning that only one month has to take up space in the small three-way fridge in our 17-foot Burro trailer. The medication must be kept cool at all times so reaching in to check temperature in either fridge or cooler has become routine already.
Getting the supply covered by the medical system in British Columbia was no easy feat either. BC’s Fair Pharmacare system, which pro-rates the cost of prescriptions to residents according to income, has an iron-clad vacation policy. It will cover, and issue, 100 days of any prescription. If you’re planning a trip longer than 100 days, Fair Pharmacare doesn’t care. You can easily order a longer period of any prescription, but you’ll pay full price for it.
Under FairPharmacare coverage, Vicki’s MS medication costs $67.70.
Without that coverage, it rings in on the cash register at $1,660 per month.
That wasn’t an option our travel budget could absorb.
With the help of a couple of creative pharmacies, we learned that a prescription may be ordered and covered under FairPharmacare, such an oxymoron, every two weeks. Luckily, we were setting all of this up well ahead of our departure date so were able to stockpile a couple of months, using the two-week order time frame, before we resorted to the 100-day vacation supply.
There was a panicky moment where we thought it wasn’t going to work with Vicki’s MS medication and were presented with the ugly thought that we might have to cut our trip short and make a run for the border simply to get more drugs. But a pharmacy assistant at Shoppers Drug Mart, sitting at home pondering the problem one night, decided to put Vicki’s name and prescription needs on her personal calendar. She ordered precisely on the two-week interval and came through with the needed supply with FairPharmacare coverage.
We hope she enjoyed the roses we left at work for her, with our heartfelt thanks.
None of this, in any way, defrauds BC’s FairPharmacare system. We have our prescriptions filled to last us until the end of the year. Had we stayed home and not travelled, FairPharmacare would have covered the same drugs in that time frame.
Point is, if you’re planning an extended trip, think about your prescription drug needs well before your planned departure date.
And don’t refer to them as drugs in front of outsiders, particularly campground hosts, border crossing guards, traffic cops, county sheriffs ....

Chemainus Gardens